Locked Rooms (18 page)

Holmes squinted through the smoke at the younger man, thinking over the man’s words. “If I hear you aright, you are telling me that you prefer to act in cases that suit your moral stance, and that this particular case you are on is making you suspect that your employers are not on the side of the angels.”

“Yeah, well, a man’s got to live with the person in the mirror.”

Especially, thought Holmes, when the man’s own mortality stood so clearly outlined at his shoulder.

“Your doubts therefore explain why you came with me so willingly. To see if my side, as it were, suited your ethics more comfortably.”

“I thought I’d listen to what you had to say.”

Which suggested the possibility, Holmes reflected, that the man had not only willingly permitted himself to be taken in the alley, but might even have set it up with precisely that end in view. He raised a mental eyebrow, reappraising the thin man before him: It had been a long time since he’d come across that combination of intelligence and fearlessness.

Russell had it, and half a dozen others he’d known through the years.

One of whom had been Professor Moriarty.

“So, do I get to ask a question now?” Hammett said.

“You may ask.”

“Yeah, I know, and you might not answer. But that would be the end of a beautiful friendship, wouldn’t it?”

Again the faint glint of amusement from the grey eyes. “Your question being, Why didn’t I shoot you in the face when we met in the alley?”

“That’s as good a place to start as any.”

“I suppose one might say, better a known enemy than an unseen potential.”

Hammett blinked. “You have a lot of ‘unseen potentials’ around?”

“One, at least. Unless that was you who took a shot at my wife the other evening?”

The thin man’s jaw dropped as his features went slack for a moment, an expression of shock that only the most subtle of actors could produce at will; Holmes did not think this man an actor. “Your wife? I didn’t know—Wait a minute. Is that the girl you were following tonight?”

“In the dark green frock, yes. Although I don’t know that she has been a ‘girl’ in all the years I’ve known her.”

“And someone took a shot at her?”

“Wednesday night, about six o’clock, in Pacific Heights.”

“At the house?”

“So you know where her house is?”

Instead of answering, Hammett sat for a minute drumming the finger-tips of his right hand on the table while he studied the man across from him, weighing the fancy accent and clothes against the man’s undeniable competence and the vein of toughness Hammett could feel in him. Toughness was a quality that Hammett respected.

“Why’d you take those two business cards from my wallet?” he asked suddenly.

Holmes reached into his pocket and laid the scraps of pasteboard on the table, pushing them slightly apart with a long finger. “Because they’re yours. The others are fakes.” He looked into Hammett’s eyes, and smiled. “You’re an investigator, of some kind. The Pinkerton’s card was real because no sane investigator would disguise himself as an investigator. Of the others, all of them provided you with a front for asking questions—insurance, municipal water company, local newspaper, voting registry—except for the jeweller’s. Therefore, that is real, too.”

“Yeah,” Hammett told him. “I write ad copy for them, sometimes. Pays the rent.”

He looked at the cards for a moment, then his right hand clenched into a fist and beat gently once on the table-top, the gesture of a judge’s gavel, before the fingers spread out to brace his weight as he rose.

“Come on, I need to show you what I got.”

Holmes did not hesitate: Russell would simply have to look after herself. Outside the bar, Hammett threw up a hand to hail a passing taxi, giving an address on Eddy Street. Hammett knew the driver by name, and during the brief ride the two residents tossed around speculations concerning “the Babe’s” homers this season (Babe, Holmes eventually decided, being the name of a sports figure and neither an affectionate term for a female nor a mythic blue ox; from his earlier time living in Chicago he knew that “homer” referred not to a Greek philosopher but a baseball play—the home run); Harry Wills’s chances against Dempsey in the September fight that had just been announced (Wills and Dempsey apparently being professional boxers, not street thugs); the ludicrous conversation the driver had overheard recently between two passengers concerning the bridging of the Golden Gate, which both he and Hammett agreed would provide a huge opportunity for graft and never so much as a jungle foot-bridge to show for it; and the ever more lamentable state of the city’s traffic. Holmes contributed nothing but sat absorbing local vocabulary with his ears while his eyes studied the passing streets. He also noted Hammett’s careful survey of his surroundings before he climbed out of the cab, as well as the fact that the house number he had given the driver was down the street from the one they eventually entered.

He’d have been one of the better Pinkerton operatives Holmes had seen—if he’d been a Pinkerton.

The Eddy address was an apartment house. Just inside the door, the air was thick with the smell of alcohol.

“Boot-leggers,” Hammett explained. “It’s not usually this bad, but they dropped a box last night.”

Upstairs, the Hammett residence proved to be a small, worn, scrupulously clean space with aggressively fresh air overcoming the reek of alcohol. Hammett left his coat on but dropped his grey hat onto the stand before he led his guest into the front room, closing its door quietly and crossing over to close the wide-open windows. “My wife’s a nurse,” he said. “Fresh air’s a religion to her. It’ll warm up in a minute.”

He took a half-full bottle from a cluttered table set against the wall, poured two glasses, and brought them to the chairs in the front window, picking up a limp rag-doll from one. He brushed its skirt straight and set it on the sofa, where it made a miniature third party to their discussion, then took the other chair and pulled a tobacco pouch and papers from his pocket. With the windows closed, a faint trace of ammonia did battle with the boot-legger’s accident: a child’s nappies.

Holmes took one sip of his drink, to demonstrate that the declared truce still held, then set the glass down firmly on the little side-table.

“Mr Hammett, you may at one time have been a Pinkerton operative, but you are no longer. For whom are you working?”

The man’s brown eyes flew open in surprise, and he held them open as a show of innocence. “Why do you say that?”

“Young man, you bring me here yet expect me to believe you an active operative? Do not take me for a fool. You receive an Army disability pension because of your lungs, and you have no doubt supplemented that from time to time with work for the agency, but you are a man who at times is so debilitated you cannot make it from one end of the apartment to the next without stopping to rest. At the moment you are attempting to support your wife and small daughter by writing for popular journals.”

The bone-thin fingers slowly resumed their movements, automatically taking a precise pinch of tobacco and arranging it along the centre of the paper without his looking. “You want to tell me how you know all that?”

“Eyes, man: have them, use them. The doll, a woman’s magazine on the side-table, two envelopes from the United States Army in a pigeon-hole, the Underwood on the kitchen table, and a pile of manuscript pages and copies of such literary works as
Black Mask.
Mr Hammett, I of all people should recognise the signs of a struggling writer.”

“The
Smart Set
on the side-table is mine, not my wife’s,” Hammett asserted, but weakly. “I write for them. But how could you know of my occasional . . . debility?”

“A series of chair-backs have worn marks into the wall-paper where they are occasionally arranged to allow you to walk the thirty feet from chair to bath without falling to the floor,” Holmes told him dismissively. “Satisfied?”

Hammett’s eyes fell at last to the cigarette his fingers had made. He ran a tongue along the edge, pressed it, and as he lit a match his eyes came back to Holmes’. “You’re that Holmes, aren’t you? The detective.”

“I am, yes.”

“I always thought . . .”

“That I was a fictional character?”

“That maybe there’d been some . . . exaggerations.”

Holmes laughed aloud. “One of the inadvertent side-effects of Watson’s florid writing style coupled with Conan Doyle’s name is that Sherlock Holmes tends to be either wildly overestimated, or the other extreme, dismissed entirely as something of a joke. It used to infuriate me—Doyle’s a dangerously gullible lunatic—but apart from the blow to my ego, it’s actually remarkably convenient.”

“You don’t say,” Hammett responded, clearly taken aback at the idea of the flesh-and-blood man seated in his living-room being considered a piece of fiction. And no doubt wondering how he would feel, were someone to do the same to him.

It was all a bit dizzying.

Fortunately, Holmes had his eye on the ball. “Now, will you tell me who hired you to follow me?”

“Okay. You’re right. But it was through the Pinkertons. I used to work for them, and like I said, I still do little jobs for them from time to time, when I feel up to it. I had a bad spell recently, but the rent’s due, so when one of my old partners there called and said they needed a couple nights’ work I said sure. But after I’d got the job, I began to wonder if he hadn’t thought the job stunk and decided to palm it off on me. Here, let me show you.”

He went to the table and opened the top drawer, pulling out a thick brown file folder, which he laid on the small table and flipped open, sliding the top piece of paper over to Holmes. On it was printed:

I wish to know all possible details concerning the whereabouts and interests of Mr. S. Holmes and Miss M. Russell, staying at the St Francis Hotel. She owns a house in Pacific Heights. I shall phone you at 8:00 on the morning of Tuesday, 6 May for news.

“That’s what I got, that and a ’phone call. Now, it’s not unusual to get a case over the ’phone, but I like to meet my clients face-to-face, and the lady didn’t seem all that eager to meet with me. Refused, in fact. And paid cash in an envelope delivered by messenger—not a service either, just a kid, a shabby one. The whole set-up made me feel pretty uncomfortable.”

“Thinking that perhaps you were being brought into something less than legal?”

“That there was something shady here, and I don’t like being played for a chump.”

“‘Played for a chump’,” Holmes repeated to himself as he bent over the note with his pocket magnifying-glass. “A flavourful sample of the vernacular. Hmm. What can you tell me about your telephone caller?”

“Woman, like I said.”

“Woman, or lady?”

“I guess I’d call her a lady, if we set aside the question of whatever it is she’s up to. Anyway, she talked like someone who’d been educated. In the South—deep South, that is.”

Holmes’ head snapped up from the handwritten note. “A Southern woman?” he said sharply. “From what part of the South?”

“That I couldn’t say. Not Texas, deeper than that—Alabama, Georgia, maybe the Carolinas, that sort of thing. Slow like molasses, you know?”

But Holmes was not so easily satisfied. “Did she use any words that struck you as slightly unusual?” he pressed. “What about her vowels—what did her
a
’s sound like? Did she employ any hidden diphthongs?”

Hammett, however, could be no clearer than he had been; Holmes shook his head and returned to the note, leaving the younger man to feel that he had let down the Pinkerton side rather badly.

“You getting anything out of that?” he asked, sounding a trifle short.

“Very little,” Holmes admitted, but before Hammett could make a pointed display of his own impatience, Holmes continued. “Criminals print because it conceals everything about them up to and including their sex. I see very little here, other than the obvious, of course: that she is right-handed, middle-aged, in good health, and educated; that she is probably American—hence the profligate scattering of full-stops—but has spent long enough in Europe that ‘six May’ rather than ‘May six’ comes to her pen; that said pen is expensive and probably gold-nibbed but the ink is not her own, as it shows an unfortunate tendency to clump and dry unevenly. The paper itself might reward enquiries from the city’s stationers, although the watermark appears neither remarkable nor exclusive. And I should say that, behind its careful formation of the letters, the lady’s hand betrays a tendency toward self-centredness such as one sees in the hand of most career criminals.”

“The lady’s a crook? Well, that sure narrows things down in a town this size.”

“I shouldn’t hold my breath,” Holmes agreed, folding his magnifying-glass into its pocket and handing back the brief note. “Businessmen and even mere social climbers often display the same traits.”

“You don’t say?” Hammett mused, holding the note up into the light as if to follow the track of the older man’s deductions.

“Graphology is far from an exact science, but it does reward study.” Holmes sat back in the chair, took out his pipe and got it going, then fixed his host with a sharp grey eye. “So, Mr Hammett, am I to understand that you wish to terminate your employment with the lady from the South?”

“Not sure how I can do that; I took her money.”

“Have you spent it?”

In answer, Hammett opened the file again and took out the envelope that gave it its thickness, handing it to Holmes. “I opened it to see how much there was, and since then it’s sat there, untouched.”

Holmes opened the flap and ran his thumb slowly up the side of the bills within, taking note of their number and their denomination. His eyebrow arched and he looked at Hammett, who nodded as if in agreement.

“Yeah, way too much money for a couple days’ trailing.”

“But as, what is the term? ‘Hush money’?”

“You can see why I got nervous.”

Holmes dropped the envelope back in the file; Hammett flipped the cover shut as if to put the money out of sight. “What I can see,” said Holmes, “is that I’m dealing with a man who prefers to choose his employer.”